About This Guide - Silicon Graphics CHALLENGE RAID Owner's Manual

About This Guide

®
The CHALLENGE RAID storage system provides a compact,
high-capacity, high-availability source of disk storage for the complete
line of Silicon Graphics
with XFS™: CHALLENGE S, CHALLENGE DM, CHALLENGE L, and
CHALLENGE XL. It also works with IRIX 6.1 and 6.2 on the POWER
CHALLENGE L and XL.
The CHALLENGE RAID storage system uses high-availability disk storage
in as many as 20 disk modules. For even more storage, the CHALLENGE
RAID rack storage system offers up to four RAID chassis assemblies, each
with as many as 20 disk modules. The chassis assemblies in a CHALLENGE
RAID rack can be connected to one or more SCSI buses on CHALLENGE
servers separately or in combination.
RAID levels 0, 1, 1_0 (0+1), and 5 are supported, as well as disks configured
as hot spares. In addition, a basic CHALLENGE RAID storage system
provides storage-system caching.
Structure of This Guide
This guide contains the following chapters:
• Chapter 1, "Features of the CHALLENGE RAID Storage System,"
introduces the main CHALLENGE RAID components and summarizes
RAID levels and data availability and performance features.
• Chapter 2, "Storage System Configurations," explains CHALLENGE
RAID configurations in detail: basic, dual-interface/dual-processor,
and split-bus.
• Chapter 3, "Operating the Storage System," describes how to check
status, identify failing components, and start and shut down the
storage system.
®
CHALLENGE servers running IRIX™ 5.3 and 5.3
xi